Back almost a decade ago, developer Peter Menkes looked at a bunch of unsightly, sprawling parking lots just south of the Gardiner Expressway and saw a place for Toronto’s financial core to grow.

For years some of those lots had been quietly up for sale with no takers. And while the one thing that made them golden was sitting right there in plain sight, strangely it took a suburban office builder to see it.

Those lots were just steps from the busiest commuter hub in Canada — Union Station — and tens of thousands of workers.

When Menkes announced in 2006 plans to build the 30-storey Telus building — only the second major new office building to stretch skyward in downtown Toronto in 20 years — there was considerable skepticism.

This week, there almost sighs of relief as Menkes, president of the company’s commercial division, announced another South Core project (in partnership with Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan.)

One York Street will be a two million-square foot mixed-used development featuring a 35-storey office tower and two condominium towers that will bring 200,000 square feet worth of much-needed retail space, restaurants and other amenities to a waterfront community that has exploded beyond anyone’s expectations.

“Peter poked a bear and woke everybody up,” says John O’Toole, executive vice president of commercial real estate brokerage CBRE Ltd., who has been equally surprised to see about 1.6 million square feet of new office space sprout up in the South Core just since 2009, with some 4.6 million square feet more planned.

“Menkes were the pioneers down there. They are the ones who started this new wave of office development on what had been derelict lands seen simply as a means of accessing the Gardiner Expressway.”

The timing of Menkes’ One York Street announcement was fortuitous — just as a new report raised serious concerns that the GTA office workforce is likely to grow by some 500,000 people over the next 30 years.

Yet there is no coherent plan for building those new workplaces close to transit hubs. Nor is there any focus on how to provide transit access to millions of workers now toiling in bleak suburban office parks lacking basic amenities, like restaurants, and suffocating in traffic congestion, warns the report by Strategic Regional Research, a joint effort of the Canadian Urban Institute and Real Estate Search Corp.

It cautioned that today’s young workforce is looking for environmentally friendly workplaces and shunning those accessible only by car.

It also warns that suburban workplaces, such as the bustling Airport Corporate Centre just south of Pearson Airport — a virtual 905 city of some 55,000 commuters — risk stagnation unless politicians and planners can create better links to mass transit.

That’s old news to Menkes.

His family’s name graces many a highrise office tower in the 905 regions, but the company is focused on the downtown.

“It’s all about public transportation now,” says Menkes. “We developed in the Mississauga City Centre and you could build great densities, but you had to provide so much parking, it just wasn’t the right balance.”

The new 35-storey One York Street office tower has just 230 parking spots, made possible because it will have multiple pedestrian connections to Union Station and the underground PATH system. Adjacent will be 62- and 66-storey residential condo towers where workers can live.

The same size office in Mississauga would require over 3,000 parking spots, because of the lack of adequate mass transit, Menkes says.

Congestion has become such a challenge at its buildings in Airport Corporate Centre, Menkes now runs a shuttle-bus service to get workers out of cars and to and from the TTC’s Kipling Station.

The only really viable new 905 office sites now, he believes, are those close to GO Transit stations.

Menkes’ newest One York Street building is aiming for LEED Platinum certification — a big draw for today’s generation of environmentally conscious young workers — with state-of-the-art energy efficient lighting and heating, as well as lots of bike racks, storage lockers and even showers for those who ride to work.

There remains, of course, some skepticism about what Peter Menkes has planned for South Core, but this time for different reasons.

Two busy Gardiner down ramps onto York and Bay streets will be removed as part of the project to make way for a one-acre park. They will be replaced by a new one exiting onto Simcoe St.

The condo towers will add 1,200 new units to a softening condo market that many believe is already over saturated.

And, as many commercial real estate experts were asking when Menkes announced the Telus project, as office vacancy rates were dropping from extraordinary highs in 2003 of over 12 per cent: Are there really enough companies, and employees, out there to fill all these new towers?

“This is the new centre ice for where people want to be,” says Menkes. “People are the driver of this new wave of office development because they want to live, work and play in their own backyards, so to speak, which is the downtown.”

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